Re:Git Branches: Intuition and Reality
by ajross on Thursday November 23, 2023 @12:56PM
(#38395452)
> Git was made by C people and they’re used to referring to entire data structures by way of some root element.
FWIW this is actually backwards. The word "branch" was already in common use (to refer to the same basic idea) in SCM systems going back decades, and in almost all of those a "branch" was indeed a first class object with its own data that acted as a "container" for commits, both semantically and physically.
The fact that a "branch" is just a pointer is in fact a git innovation on top of the former idea.
FWIW this is actually backwards. The word "branch" was already in common use (to refer to the same basic idea) in SCM systems going back decades, and in almost all of those a "branch" was indeed a first class object with its own data that acted as a "container" for commits, both semantically and physically.
The fact that a "branch" is just a pointer is in fact a git innovation on top of the former idea.